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Facebook Updates Camera App, Talks Mobile Strategy

Scott Raymond, originally worked with Gowalla, now works at Facebook on the Camera App. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Photo by Ariel Zambelich

Facebook has released its first significant update to Facebook Camera, the social network's standalone photo-sharing app. The 1.1 version of Facebook Camera responds to one of the biggest user demands since the app's launch in late May: album support. Now users can create and edit Facebook albums from within the Camera app. The update adds several other new features, including a News tab for photo-related notifications, the ability to "Like" comments, and overall bug fixes.

When you upload photos in the Facebook Camera 1.1, a new Albums icon appears. Tap that and you'll be able to select an existing photo album or create a new one for your post. By default, your photos will go to your "Mobile Uploads" album, which has been the case since Facebook Camera launched. But that's been a problem for users, who gave version 1.0 a lowly 2.5-star rating on the App Store, frequently dinging it for the lack of album support. This update suggests that Facebook has been paying attention.

"We want people to tell stories in littler clumps," said Scott Raymond, an engineer on the Facebook Camera team and a co-founder of location-based social network Gowalla, which Facebook acquired in 2011. "It's more natural and it's more suited for mobile. But Albums has been part of the Facebook Photos product for years and users love them and there's plenty of valid use cases for it. The Album [support] illustrates that we're constantly listening to user feedback."

Just last week, Facebook updated its main iOS app to address the speed issues that have plagued it in the past. Facebook scrapped all of the app's old web-based code for a more efficient native code base, resulting in an app that works twice as fast. The main app also ported some of the code that the Facebook Camera team had developed in order to make photo uploads speedier.

"The lessons that we learned here are in the Facebook app now," Raymond said. "That's another interesting thing about this kind of approach we have of multiple mobile apps. We are constantly learning from one another and figuring out what works and moving it from platform to platform."

One obvious question is how much Instagram, Facebook's recent and most expensive acquisition, factors into all of this. The answer, according to Raymond, is not very much. "The Instagram deal hasn't actually closed yet," he said. "So there hasn't been any great deal of conversation between the two teams yet."

The updated Facebook Camera app feed.

Images: Facebook

But if the main Facebook app incorporates features developed for Facebook Camera app, what is the value in having so many standalone offerings? Raymond says that it has to do with the product experience as well as the way individual app teams function. A standalone app has a relatively small team that stays focused on building a very specific experience as well as it can. Instead of trying to pack more and more features into a single app – like with the main Facebook app – engineers on the Messenger or Camera teams can drill down to what works best for a given task. The standalones act as incubators for features that, if successful, may find their way into the main app.

"We can build the best photo experience we can on mobile," Raymond said. "And when we discover patterns or techniques that work really well, they can be ported back into the main iOS app or in some cases even cross-platform. The general app tries to do all of these things as well as it can. But sometimes it's nice to have a very focused experience."

For example, if you want to know about your latest Facebook photo-related news, Camera should be your go-to source, rather than the full Facebook app. The News tab limits notifications to when somebody has commented or "liked" one of your photos, or if you've been tagged in an image. You don't have to deal with all of your other Facebook activity.

Another advantage to Facebook's standalone app teams is that each functions fairly independently, as mini-startups within a larger company. Raymond first joined Facebook in January 2012 after the company acquired Gowalla, where he was CTO. Gowalla spent years focused on mobile sharing, which made the move natural. But according to Raymond, the fact that he got to work on a very small team straight out of Facebook boot camp definitely helped.

"It was pretty cool to just be able to plug into a team that felt like home," Raymond said. "For the first five or six months I was at the company, I didn't even sit at my own desk. That all conspired to make it feel like a very startup-y experience. I went from one small room of people who are all hacking a brand new project straight to another one."

With the updated Camera app following the new Facebook iOS app, it's clear that the company is putting a lot of energy into mobile. Still, Facebook has a lot of work ahead of it as its mobile teams figure out how to combine all the standalone apps with the main Facebook app into something that can bring the Facebook web experience to small screens.

"It's a constant balancing act," Raymond said. "We are getting better and better at developing mobile experiences in the context of the platform that they are on and also borrowing within the company."